“NADA” at Fondazione Prada, Milan

“NADA,” the solo exhibition conceived by Belgian artist Thierry De Cordier (Ronse, Belgium, 1954) for the three rooms of the Cisterna, features ten paintings from the series of the same name created between 1999 and 2025. De Cordier has dedicated his 40- year career to experimenting with different languages, from sculpture and writing to installations and painting. In his most recent production, the artist has focused on the concept of God. The canvases of the NADA cycle stem from the artist’s explicit desire to erase the image of the Crucifixion and strive to represent the sublime or “the greatness of nothing.”

De Cordier follows the tradition of the 17th-century Spanish and Flemish masters ––Rubens, van Dyck, Zurbarán, Ribera, Murillo, and Velázquez––of depicting the sacred subject on a dark background but with a radical gesture of denial. His art has close ties with the Spanish cultural and historical context. Indeed, a key reference for the conception of the NADA series is the 16th-century Carmelite friar Saint John of the Cross, mystic poet and theoretician of the ascetic doctrine of Nada y Todo (Nothing and Everything). “NADA” is also the inscription with which De Cordier replaces the initials INRI (Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews) on Christ’s Cross, a recurrent feature in Christian iconography. By obliterating the figure of Christ on the Cross with dense fields of color made of oils, watercolors, and bitumen, the original subject is rendered almost invisible and the canvas becomes a pictorial space that opens onto emptiness. De Cordier thus sets himself a philosophical task: to demonstrate the finiteness of life, the condition of nothingness that appears in the title of the series.

The architecture of the Cisterna, consisting of three spaces with high ceilings illuminated from above by natural light, recalls the layout and atmosphere of a religious space. De Cordier’s exhibition design features three structures, one for each room, ideally forming a monumental triptych. The large paintings are hung in the center of the long side of each display module, while the smaller canvases are housed in niches on the shorter sides. A bench placed in front of the colossal Gran Nada (2007–12) in the central room of the Cisterna acts as a point of observation and contemplation, marking the fulcrum of the entire installation.

at Fondazione Prada, Milan
until September 29, 2025